Sophie Ellis-Bextor is an English singer and songwriter. She first came to prominence in the late 1990s as the lead singer of the indie rock band Theaudience. The band released four singles, including the UK Top 40 hits “I Know Enough (I Don’t Get Enough)” and “A Pessimist is Never Disappointed”, and one self-titled album (1998). Videos for the band’s singles were directed by her father, Robin Bextor. While in Theaudience, readers of Melody Maker voted Ellis-Bextor number five in a poll of ‘most sexy people in rock’. The band split in 1999 after demos for a planned second album were rejected by their label Mercury Records, who then dropped the band.
After Theaudience split, Ellis-Bextor collaborated with Italian DJ Spiller, in 2000, adding vocals to his track “Groovejet (If This Ain’t Love). “Groovejet” won several awards: it received ninth place in the contest for the Greatest No. 1 of all time. In 2000, it was a finalist in The Record of the Year. In that same year, it won the awards for Best Single and Best Ibiza Tune at the Ericsson Muzik Awards.
In 2001, Ellis-Bextor released her début album, Read My Lips. It reached number two on the UK charts and spawned four top-twenty hit singles. Her rework of Cher’s “Take Me Home” reached number two, as did “Murder on the Dancefloor”, which became Ellis-Bextor’s biggest single and was on charts for twenty-three weeks. “Murder on the Dancefloor” became Europe’s most played song of 2002. In 2002, Read My Lips was re-released with two new songs (and a live version of “Groovejet”) and Ellis-Bextor won the Recording Artist Award at that year’s Showbusiness Awards. Her third single, “Get Over You”, was released in June 2002 and reached number three. The fourth single, “Music Gets the Best of Me”, rose to number fourteen in December. At the beginning of 2002, Ellis-Bextor was nominated for the “British Female Solo Artist” BRIT Awards, going on to be nominated for a further two consecutive years.
Her second album, Shoot from the Hip, was released in October 2003 and yielded two further top-ten singles, “Mixed Up World” and “I Won’t Change You”. The album reached number 19 on the UK charts and was certified silver by the BPI for shipments of 60,000. Ellis-Bextor described the album as “more emotionally direct” and “a little more left-of-centre at times” than Read My Lips—”It has more of a live feel […] It’s still a pop album—with elements of disco, indie and rock.” She opted to step back from promotion of the album after becoming pregnant.
Trip the Light Fantastic, Ellis-Bextor’s third album, was released in May 2007 and reached number seven in the UK. The album produced three singles: “Catch You” (number 8 in the UK), “Me and My Imagination” (number 23), and “Today the Sun’s on Us” (number 64). The song “If I Can’t Dance” was announced as a single but later retracted. Her fourth album, Make a Scene, was released in June 2011 following a year-long delay during which she left her label Universal Music Group to establish her own label, EBGBs.
In May 2011, she revealed that she had begun work on her fifth album – Wanderlust. “Young Blood” was released as the lead single from Wanderlust in November 2013, peaking at number three on the UK Indie Chart and at number 34 on the UK Singles Chart. The album was released in January 2014 and peaked at number four on the UK Albums Chart and at number one on the UK Independent Albums Chart.
n 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown in the UK, Ellis-Bextor performed live weekly “Kitchen Disco” concerts featuring herself and her family, streamed live from their kitchen on Instagram. Beginning in June 2020, Ellis-Bextor started a weekly podcast titled Spinning Plates with Sophie Ellis-Bextor on which she interviews working mothers. Guests have included Fearne Cotton, Caitin Moran, Myleene Klass, Roisin Murphy, and her mother Janet Ellis. Ellis-Bextor’s “Murder on the Dancefloor” was featured in the last scene of the 2023 film Saltburn. As a result, the song re-entered the UK singles chart, peaking at number two and garnered its most-ever global streams on Spotify, receiving more than 1.4 million streams on New Year’s Eve.
